Aging can be a real kicker

   When you get to be my age, it seems that every time you open your inbox, someone has e-mailed you a list titled “You know you’re over the hill when:” 

   For every occasion, friends send you Maxine greeting cards with an in-your-face reminder of a milestone you otherwise never would have noticed.

   And every year, more and more women your age—and younger—go out and buy a carefully coordinated purple dress and red hat, the official uniform for all women who proudly proclaim themselves to be old enough to be non-conformists.

   Actually, except for the times other people force me to notice, I stopped marking milestones long ago.

   My first sign of aging was being too old to flirt with the paperboy. Our neighbor Bobby was four years my senior and delivered papers all the way through college. Then one day he got a real job and the next thing I knew a twelve-year-old kid was handing me the paper.

   On Lake Erie where I grew up, flirting with those bronze hunks who were lined up along the beach was just part of life. But as I neared my college graduation, I realized that most of those guys were younger than I was. Oh, sure, there were a few lifers, so to speak, but how much depth is there to a 25-year-old guy who’s still a lifeguard? Even Gidget and her gang grew up.

   A few years later, I related my observations about aging to a friend who was in her 30’s. She thought a moment and told her first sign of age was when college girls seemed like kids to her. I sure wasn’t there yet. And before long, I was so focused on my own life, my own career, my own family, that I didn’t think much about how I was aging compared to the people around me. Of course I’m aware that I’m growing older and I’ve grown used to store clerks offering me the senior discount without my offering to show them ID. But that’s a matter of the clerks perceiving me to be old, not a matter of my perceiving myself to be older. I still don’t do that. Well, at least until last week I didn’t. 

   My husband and I went to the see the Rockettes at the Fox. I had seen them once before when I was in college and was really thrilled to be able to see them again.

   After the show we went out to dinner and I went on and on about how they were just as good, just as precise, just as entertaining as they were forty years ago. Everything about them was exactly the same. Except for one thing. Forty years ago, the dancers were all women. This time, they were all kids.


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